The charts that show no one will be able to stop Trump

With the president-elect likely to have both the House and Senate on his side, he should be able to pass his radical agenda with ease

Donald Trump last year assured Fox News viewers he had no intention of ruling as a dictator.
He claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” to govern in his victory speech, and with the Republicans tipped to control all of Congress, he will have exactly that.
Trump had also teased his second term would be “nasty a little bit at times, and maybe at the beginning in particular”. The mass deportation of illegal immigrants was pencilled in for day one.
Records over the past 25 years show unified governments – where both chambers of the legislature are of the same party as the executive – sign a quarter more bills into law.
Here are the charts which show how nobody can stop Trump’s radical agenda.
The 118th Congress, the current two-year session running from 2023 to inauguration day 2025, is on track to be the least productive in history.
Just 106 bills had been enacted as of election day, a far cry from the 365 of its predecessor.
Having lost control of the House in the 2022 midterms, president Joe Biden’s Democrats have been floundering.
Most new entrants to the White House do so carrying the upper and lower house with them. This was the case for both Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2016.
This is sometimes known as the “coattail effect”, whereby the wave of popularity of the leader is ridden by fellow party candidates further down the ballot.
But these days, “trifectas” rarely last: once the norm, over the past 25 years the government has been divided around two-thirds of the time.
Some view this in a positive light, as it means no major decisions are made without negotiated compromise. But in an age of unprecedented polarisation, the result is often gridlock.
Since the turn of the millennium, politically aligned Congresses passed an average of 436 bills per session. Divided governments, meanwhile, got just 350 over the line.
A third of the 100-seat Senate was up for grabs on Nov 5. Despite a handful were still undeclared 48 hours later, the Republicans had crossed the 51 mark required for a majority.
This has a huge impact on the president’s political strength: the Senate having sole responsibility for approving Trump’s most senior appointments, from Supreme Court justices to key administrators.
Under the guise of “draining the swamp” the president-elect is widely expected to purge the federal government of those unsubscribed to MAGA. A friendly Senate makes this process largely frictionless.
In the House, the GOP went into these elections with a razor-thin 1.8 percentage point margin – holding just six more seats than their opponents in the 435-strong chamber.
This is the narrowest margin in decades, and indicative of the long-term trend.
House Democrats and Republicans are now farther apart ideologically than at any other point during the past half-century, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.
Bipartisanship is ever more elusive as a result, making majority margins ever more critical.
For every extra point the party holding the balance of power has been ahead since 1973, Congress passed an extra 13 laws during the session.
The 50 states are increasingly homogenous internally.
Two days after the polls closed in 2024, just seven were considered “split” politically – where the majority of a state’s delegations in either the House or Senate were not from the same party as the president.
In 1984, the election that returned Ronald Reagan for a second term, there were a total of 53 cases of a split in a Senate or House compared with the president’s party.
While this may too be seen as a boon – empowering the state government apparatus to follow in Washington’s footsteps – it is in turn a worrying sign of polarisation.
Geographically, a recent New York Times investigation found Americans were flocking to neighbourhoods more closely in tune with their personal politics, creating a tangibly more divided country.
Ideologically, it is also evidence of voters increasingly casting ballots for a party, rather than individual names on merit: colour over candidate.
Add in growing rates of partisan apathy – with members of each faction viewing the other increasingly negatively – and you get an explosive mix.
In his victory speech, Trump vowed to “govern by a simple motto: Promises made, promises kept.”
Now that he has the political capital to do so – far more so than in 2016 – his agenda is sure to delight his supporters and horrify his opponents.